In the related art concerning industrial plant environments, is important to maintain the operability of field devices involved in plant processes. To control plant processes, sensors are used to transmit readings for monitoring the process. In harsh environments, the field devices or sensors will degrade due to the time they are exposed to the environment. For example, in hot and high humidity environments, a transmitter device's parts or circuitry will rapidly degrade due to corrosion. Also, equipment will degrade simply due to extended periods of deployment in the field. As time goes on, abnormalities in the readings from the transmitter device will appear.
Generally, as a plant or process develops, the number of transmitter devices needed to monitor the process and collect data will grow dramatically. Especially where there is a large number of transmitter devices, it is important to ensure the operability of all transmitter devices over extended periods of normal operation. If abnormalities are unexpectedly developed, detected and reported, the process may have to be shut down for evaluation and repair. This would result in unplanned downtime and financial loss for a customer.
Even with a low percentage breakdown rate, the vast number of field devices deployed in the field means that there are still thousands of field devices or transmitter devices that may breakdown. For example, if a high humidity region of the world has 50,000 deployed field devices, a 1% failure rate per year raises the possibility that over 500 transmitter devices will fail per year. Additionally, in any given industrial process, there may be a large number of field devices, such that a single engineer or manager is responsible for the oversight of a large number of field devices. A number of field device failures at one time can strain the capability of staff to resolve problems in an efficient and effective manner.